| A review of the literature on Spanish national identity reveals that this area of research is confined to the study of Spanish regionalisms and nationalisms, such as the Basque Country, terrorist group ETA, and Catalonia. However, since the mid-1990s, globalization has caused Spain to become the destination and new home of immigrants from the Global South, reversing historical migratory patterns. This international immigration has inevitably altered the ethnic composition of Spain presenting a unique historical opportunity to explore whether a Spanish national identity can be identified, and how and why, under these new circumstances, that identity has been re-imagined.;To this end, this dissertation first investigates whether discourses in the media are constructed as binary representations of inclusion of Spaniards and exclusion of immigrants from the Global South. In further deconstructing these discourses, one of the main objectives of this research project is to investigate whether and how Spain is producing and reproducing class-, race-, and gender-based discourses, and which productions are contributing to the reconstruction, reproduction, and re-imagining of a particular type of national identity. In addition, this project is interested in uncovering power relations and the structural system underlying the production of such discourses. The main objective of the study is not simply to investigate the representations of ideas but also to explain why such representations take form. It is acknowledged in this dissertation that the analyses of discourses relate to the concept of power and its relationship with knowledge and, thus, that the discourses offer the means to describe or narrate "reality" in a particular way.;To investigate the core questions, this study analyzes the language used in the Spanish newspapers El Mundo and El Pais for the years 1994 and 2004. To do so, I have developed a method of combining content and critical discourse analysis (CDA), using both quantitative and qualitative techniques. In addition, intensive field work in Spain provided the opportunity to collect primary data, conduct field observation, and perform primary semi-structured interviews of Spanish politicians, governmental organizations, and nongovernmental organizations. To investigate power relations and material causes for discourse production, I conducted economic analysis of primary documents as well. |
